Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

I heard the garbage trucks outside. Ronnie was probably making his appearance at the young girl’s, the one he was keeping on a layaway plan. Not as he had doubtlessly promised, hours earlier, but now, in the final moments of night, to take what she offered.

The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She’s in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, spaces for hope: something good might happen.

There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed.

But then she was putting on her ratty underwear and the rest of her clothes and chasing a traveling salesman out of a motel room, abandoning the curlers for good.

Hey! Hey, wait up!

I came to rehearse parts of this film, my memory of the scenes returning in more detail as I watched. I began to anticipate. Not the lines, though I remembered a few of them, but looks on the woman’s face.

Gazing at department store mannequins as if they possessed something essential and human that she lacked. Mannequins were carefully positioned to look natural, looking off in this direction or that but never at us. This was part of the Sears Mannequin Standard. My mother had worked for a short time as an assistant window dresser at the Sears in downtown Reno. She was given a booklet with a list of instructions, the most important being the no-eye-contact rule. If the mannequins made eye contact with shoppers they would disrupt the dream, the shopper’s projection. A mannequin’s job was to sell us to ourselves in a more perfect version for $19.99.

The woman peered at the mannequins for guidance. Examining their enameled makeup, a purse dangling from a stiff arm, a pole supporting each life-size figure from behind, disappearing into a hole cut into the rear seam of her slacks. They each have a pole up their ass, says the sudden wryness in the woman’s face. How about that.

Her face when Mr. Dennis, the jumpy man, tosses her new lemon pants out the car window: childlike disappointment.

When you’re with me, no slacks. No slacks!

Tosses her lipstick.

Makes you look cheap.

When you’re with me, no curlers. Why don’t you get a hat?

You don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, he tells her. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing. You might as well be dead.

Everything goes wrong when they try to rob a bank. It was like poor Tim Fontaine, Ronnie’s younger brother. Tim Fontaine, who had robbed a bank and then waited at a crowded bus stop when the ink bomb in the money bag went off. Why didn’t he take a cab? I’d wondered. “Because that’s my brother,” Ronnie said. “If he was smart enough to take a cab he might have figured out some other way to finance his drug habit.” Ronnie said that before his brother robbed banks he sold heroin in Bushwick and that it was a stupidly hard job, sixteen-hour days, and his only pay was a morning and evening fix. “That’s the thing about junkies,” Ronnie said, “they work like dogs, it’s all day out on the streets and they think they’re cheating the system. I told my brother, you make twelve cents an hour.” “How much do you make, Ronnie?” Sandro had joked. And Ronnie said, “I don’t make a wage, I’m an artist. I’m not part of the system.” “Neither is your brother,” Sandro said. “So you have to tack on something to his twelve cents an hour, some added value.”

I once met Tim Fontaine. I’d had ideas about what he’d be like, as a brother of Ronnie’s, and as a person who’d spent several years robbing banks and armored cars before he was caught. I pictured sideburns like Ronnie’s, swaggering and handsome like Ronnie, the never-washed and greasy Levi’s, the motorcycle boots. The sarcasm. Sunglasses propped on his head and the slightest, barest touch of a grace that was almost feminine, because Ronnie had a pretty mouth. In other words, I pictured Ronnie. Tim Fontaine was nothing like Ronnie. He mumbled and shuffled and stared at the floor. He wore the stiff, ill-fitting, and too-new-looking work clothes I later learned is the universal wardrobe of ex-cons. The severe, barbershop hair. A mustache that covers some kind of pitting or scarring. The awkward bulk of prison yard muscles. There was a sense with Tim Fontaine that it was all uphill from here. Twelve steep steps, then repeat. He barely looked at me when I met him, just stared at his hands, the pads of his fingers crusted and shiny. “The dumbfuck removed his fingerprints with acid when he turned eighteen,” Ronnie said. “As if that won’t instantly ID you as a criminal.”

Nearing the end of the film, morning in a deserted quarry. The woman wakes up in a car, a soldier unzipping his pants and forcing himself on her. She escapes, runs screaming into the woods in her white sandals, slingbacks Mr. Dennis had borrowed from the trunk of a car in the Woolworth’s lot. By luck they had fit her perfectly. She tears through the bramble, scratched, frantic, half-dressed, half-raped, and falls, facedown, crying.

Night at a roadside tavern. Someone fits an unlit cigarette behind her ear. She’s given a hot dog. Chews it, meek and grateful. Her beer glass is filled and refilled.

Honky-tonk music plays, fiddles eking out cheer as people shout and smoke and drink, their voices pelting the woman.

You don’t want anything, you won’t have anything. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing.

The cigarette in her long-fingered hand. Her snow-faced beauty, the light of it dim.

I am still… so… pretty . Nadine, leaning toward me to prove it.

The camera frames the woman, her eyes toward the table.

That’s it. End of film.

As if on cue, I heard our freight elevator climbing toward the top floor on its chains.

* * *

The elevator rumbled and squeaked slowly back down to its resting position on the first floor. I turned off the television and got up.

Sandro was sitting in the dark, on a chair in the middle of the large entrance room. I went for the light switch.

“No,” he said, “leave it and come here.”

He buried his head against me. I was flooded with sympathy for him. The only fair thing, I thought, was to try to share the psychic fallout for his mistake. And yet as I stroked his hair, his warm weight against me, I felt separate from what he’d done, defending eight dollars plus a phone number scribbled on a hardware store receipt — the contents of his wallet, I later saw. The number was the Trust E. Ordering takeout, probably. He’d shot a person in the hand to defend eight dollars and a phone number I knew by heart.

He picked me up and carried me to the bed. There was a bed in that room that we didn’t normally sleep in. It and the single chair were the only furniture. Sandro liked to have a bed in every room, freestanding, never pushed against a wall. Even on the floors below, which were only for displaying his finished works and the works of his friends, Stanley Kastle, Saul Oppler, John Chamberlain, a few pieces of Ronnie’s, there was a bed in each open room, islands of domestic comfort in spaces otherwise so spare that an old steam radiator in the corner, its silver paint flaking, seemed homey and domestic. The only person who used these beds was Sandro. He liked a surface for lying down and thinking, for feeling the space of a room, for looking up at the high, repeating pattern of stamped tin, listening as the cobblestones made their hollow clomp -clomp when trucks passed on the street below. Its austerity gave Sandro’s loft the feel of a very clean machine shop. Everything in it was coated in a fine residue that had a greasy sustenance to it, like graphite shavings, dust that left a blackish smear if you tried to wipe it from a windowsill, or if you sat on a chair in light-colored pants. Sandro’s loft would never be clean like a regular home. Machine lubricants and the solvents and by-products of fabric treatment were stained into the floorboards in ghost-dark shadows. In the building’s former life it had been a dress factory. When Sandro first bought it, Gloria Kastle was working for him as an assistant, one aspect of their “long history,” which Gloria took pleasure in alluding to and Sandro rolled his eyes at. Dress pins had been packed into the spaces between every floorboard, and Gloria’s job had been to pull them out, crouching on her knees with a handheld magnet. It took her a week and her back hurt for months afterward, but she said she grew attached to the task, consolidating stray pins. “When I closed my eyes at night,” she said, “I saw pins being coaxed from cracks and crevices with a very strong magnet, the pins sticking to one another like a chain of paper dolls.” Sandro had done the brute work, unbolted and javelined the scores of industrial ironing boards into an open dumpster in front of the building, whose sea level of discarded machinery rose each day and was magically lowered each night as nocturnal scavengers climbed into the dumpster and carried things away.